Great things are (rightly) expected of the 26-year-old David Gordon Green, the director of this exquisitely tender, funny and sad film. And on the basis of this stunningly impressive feature debut, he is set to become a Terrence Malick for the 21st century, reviving the values of artistry and reflectiveness in American indie cinema.

Green's movie is about black and white kids whiling away a long, hot summer in North Carolina - almost floating in torpor - a torpor which is dispelled by the tragic accident they finally get mixed up in. It is superbly photographed and its tremendous compositional sense shows the rigour of a young master. The railroad tracks, clapboard houses and municipal swimming pool endow the movie with a distinctively classic, almost literary feel; it gestures to a robustly American cultural context which seems to go back to Faulkner and Twain.

This is also a movie which shows poor white and young black people without aggression, without cynicism, without attitude, without Tupac or Eminem on the soundtrack. They exist in a cinematic space innocent of any of this, and yet the movie never for a second looks naive or dated. And the performances from the non- professionals that Green has recruited are simply miraculous in their easy charm. George Washington is an almost awe- inspiringly accomplished movie with an absolute faith in its own aesthetic sense, and an unapologetic preoccupation with finding beauty in the look of ordinary places, people and things.

This mockumentary - or if you will, soccumentary - is about a hapless but lovable England football manager played by Ricky Tomlinson. It was clearly conceived long before Sven Goran Eriksson and his miraculous 5-1 victory, so the film's entire premise, with its jokey stoicism, suddenly looks obsolete: they thought it was all over, but it's not now.

Specifically, Mike Bassett looks like a superfluous tribute to Channel 4's genuine fly-on-the-wall classic about Graham "Do I Not Like That" Taylor; there's a nutter based on Gazza; a nervy yes-man based on Phil Neal. All yesterday's news, surely?

Mike Bassett has got some very good gags, especially at the beginning, and Tomlinson turns in a first-class performance as the big-hearted bumbling idealist, who, like Alan Partridge, starts his career in Norwich. But the inevitable slide into laugh-free sentimentality is worrying. Maybe Ingmar Bergman or Lukas Moodysson should be brought in to direct our football comedies.

A cast, as they say, to die for: Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Edward Norton in this "one last job" heist drama. De Niro is the thief bullied by ageing fence Brando into ripping off the local customs house: and forcing him to work with Norton, his super-cool but faintly unreliable protégé. The white-suited Brando wheezes into shot like Sydney Greenstreet, and shows that when he can be bothered, he can still project charisma and charm with that unmistakable nasal quavering voice, effortlessly upstaging the younger men.

But director Frank Oz doesn't have the muscle and heft of a Michael Mann. Frankly, it's all a bit dull until the final reel and the actual job, with all the traditional business of lowering oneself in a balaclava down past the infra-red beams to the safe, and even that has a double-cross "twist" you can see coming a mile away.

Like The Best Man and The Wood, both from 1999, this is in a well-established new Hollywood genre: the aspirational black marriage comedy, in which a group of upscale professional African-Americans, friends since forever, find their male bonding threatened by women. It's a genre which partly remedies the invisibility of black men and women in mainstream US cinema, though it's sometimes insidiously misogynist. Here, as ever, the impending wedding plot licenses a lip-smacking bachelor-party scene with scantily-clad "ho's", presented as in no way inconsistent with the movie's ultra-conservative and faintly callow endorsement of the matrimonial happy ending ideal. There are some bright performances, but this is thin, unremarkable comedy.

Ken Fero and Tariq Mehmood's documentary - downbeat in manner, polemical in effect - tells a harrowing story. This is the testimony of the families of those people, almost entirely black men from South and East London, who died in police custody in the 90s. As the film continues, a repeat- pattern modus operandi emerges. A twitchy, uncertain police presence on the street; a mysterious death in custody, then the closing of ranks. This has found its logical extension in sabre-rattling threats of legal action by the Police Federation, avowedly on the basis that individual policemen are mentioned, though this is always in the context of rehearsing the details of official inquiries and inquests.

Fero's film highlights the irony that, despite the ostentatious soul-searching that followed the Stephen Lawrence case, the violent deaths of black people while in official custody have been passed over in nervous silence. Injustice places itself deliberately outside this reticent media consensus. It is not clear whether Fero and Mehmood approached police authorities to be interviewed on camera, or if these requests were refused or ignored. At any rate, tight-lipped silence has unarguably been the police strategy the rest of the time, and Fero's film is about giving a voice to the relatives left behind, and their fight for answers, a fight in which they show enormous dignity. Last week, the Ritzy in Brixton, south London, pulled the film on "legal advice" - a piece of self-censorship which will make loyal Ritzy supporters groan. Let's hope the other venues across the UK and Ireland slated to show the film have more self-confidence. As a record of human courage, Injustice deserves to be seen.